


Chestnut and Hazel

by 12XU



Series: Chestnut and Hazel Extended [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Accidental Voyeurism, Boys In Love, Class Differences, Coming of Age, Desire, Edwardian Period, Eventual Romance, Gay Male Character, Heteronormativity, Internalized Homophobia, LGBTQ Character, Love at First Sight, M/M, Male Slash, Nature, Outdoor Sex, Seaside, Smut, Solitude, Summer Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-07
Updated: 2017-08-07
Packaged: 2018-12-09 02:16:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,271
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11659542
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/12XU/pseuds/12XU
Summary: ‘In my wandering attempts to lose myself, I was just as restlessly searching for something – or someone. And that rapturous, perfect summer on the Dorset coast, I found him.’Dorset, Summer 1909. A summer of surprises on England’s Jurassic coast changes everything for Tom, a brilliant young Oxford student who has long struggled to accept his sexuality.





	1. The Searcher

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fennui (paperweight)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperweight/gifts).



By nature I am, I suppose, a nomad: content enough wherever I may pitch my camp or domesticate my digs, provided I have the basic comforts and my books, pen, paper, ink, and a place to write. Some (including, at times, myself) have attributed this nature to my unsettled childhood – but the more painful, secret, truth was that my tormented adolescence had sealed my vagabond urges. By the summer of this story – when I was 20, and soon to turn 21 – I had cultivated and refined the pleasures of impermanence to a high art, even an aesthetic – but this appearance served to deny, deflect and mask another part of myself, the part I privately struggled with. Austere in my outward luxuries, I had no illusions about the nature of my inner passions. My fellow scholars at Oxford, where I had just finished my second year – gilded with promise, or so I was told – teased me gently about the former; they had no inkling of the ferocity and shame of the latter.

Unconsciously, in my wandering attempts to lose myself, I was just as restlessly searching for something – or someone. And that rapturous, perfect summer on the Dorset coast, I found him.

*******

The summer that would stir me so profoundly did not start with much promise. Since my schooldays, it had been a tradition that my cousin Kenelm would spend part of each summer down at Weymouth, where his family took a townhouse: a narrow ice-cream-pastel affair on the old harbour front. In my youth, I had stayed there too – but, as I edged towards maturity (if I dare use that word of myself at 17, 18, 19, then 20 going on 21!), I found I was growing away from this summer tradition, and growing less and less comfortable with the accustomed summer company. As new experiences and influences began to remould me – the intellectual joys and rigours of Oxford, and before Oxford the Theban disciplines of cadet life – so I grew intensely aware of my changing tastes and needs. And yet … in some profound ways, I was still unformed.

Miraculously, that summer I had been granted a way to honour my social duties to my cousin while extricating myself from the Weymouth set-up. I craved remoteness, deep nature, solitude, primordial beauty and reckless freedom – and, thanks to an indulgent older acquaintance, I had these things, in the form of a tiny former labourer’s cottage, decorated with a pleasing simplicity, and hidden away in a wooded copse on the grassy downs above Ringstead Bay. Its remote beauty was assured by obscure access: only locals, or their initiates, knew the rough, unsigned roads, the clifftop shortcuts, the tracks to the smallest coves. Yet all of this was only a few miles from Weymouth – and as my companion I had a wonderful new Norton motorcycle, a perceptive early coming-of-age present from my family.

I spent much of June fixing up the cottage to my satisfaction, punctuated by petrol-bursts across the glorious downs. On foot, I explored the astonishing geology of this stretch of coast and found its most deserted coves: swimming, or spreading out on the warm rocks to sketch or read – solitary and often naked, as there was usually no one to observe me.

The cottage I found an equally delightful place to lounge and read. In truth, it did not need much fixing. Its absent owner, Harry, was an artist and aesthete, and its simplicity was artful, not accidental. Nonetheless, I took pleasure in bending Harry’s style to mine. Most of the ground floor was given over to an ample library-cum-study-cum-snug planned around a large daybed, with a spartan bathroom across the tiny hall. Narrow stairs led up to an open-beamed sitting room above. Outside in the yard were a standpipe with hose – which doubled as a cold shower – with a primitive kitchen in a separate outhouse. The place harmonised with its wooded surroundings, but I was equally seduced by its insistent pulse of masculinity once inside – redolent of wood-smoke, and pungent with the aroma and stiff creak of leather. I mean leather _furniture_ : Harry had quite a taste for hide, from the upstairs couch down to the vast library bed.

As the longest day edged close, so Kenelm arrived in Weymouth and, with him, my obligation to drink and dine with him. And so, one balmy Saturday teatime, with a reluctant sigh, I shaved and groomed, pressed my favourite open-collared shirt, and prepared for my night on the town. I glowed pink from the beach, and the fresh, fine Egyptian cotton of the shirt lay pleasurably cool against my skin. The few weeks of sun and sea air had brought colour to my face and lightened my ash-blond hair. Down in the gentlemen’s dining room at The Ship Inn on the Weymouth quay – favoured by my cousin for as long as he had been old enough to drink – no doubt my sunburn would be noted as ungentlemanly, just as I always feared that some gesture or other would mark me as unmanly. But then – I reflected – I was only marginally a gentleman, and the solitary joys of the past few weeks were working a queer magic on my other fear. As I submitted my body daily to the sun and sea, shingle, rock and sand, I realised that my inner shame about what I am was fading gently like driftwood. The bleached, sunburnt self that gazed back at me from the bathroom mirror – ice-blue eyes thrown into relief by the buff shirt and reddened skin – felt clean and full of well-being.

In this mood, I rode with some care down the narrow lanes to Upton and the main road, gathering speed as the terrain became duller and easier through a couple of unremarkable outlying villages, then the curve of Weymouth Bay. Although for protection I wore a cap, goggles, a belted thigh-length biking jacket and stout black boots, the glorious early-evening sunshine made me wistful to wear less. Coming to a stand, I secured my (already!) beloved bike on the so-respectable Esplanade near the lurid gilded statue of King George. In a sartorial compromise I had devised to not disgrace Kenelm at dinner, I swapped the heavier biking garb for a lightweight twill jacket I had folded into the bike pannier, and added a cravat-like silk scarf to veil my bare throat. Combined with my well-fitting dark trousers, the overall effect was, I must say, pleasing – to me, at least. Thus attired, I strolled to my destination, passing the familiar seafront amusements to take a look at the newly erected Ritz theatre – a squat concoction topped by tumescent bronze hemispheres – before turning my back on the Pleasure Pier to cut down narrow passages towards the Custom House Quay and The Ship.

***

Kenelm and I greeted each other as warmly as ever, and the food was not all bad – to dine on a proper cooked dinner, with familiar company, made a novel change from life at the cottage. But, once our pleasantries, family news and old jokes had been exhausted, and as the evening’s drinking progressed from porter (or, for me, a lighter pale ale) to port, I was assailed by the feeling I had dreaded – an overheated claustrophobia brought on by too much Kenelm as much as our seating-booth on a warm evening.

My assigned role in our relationship had evolved, in recent years, to providing the masculine audience for Kenelm’s coarseness and tales of his supposed conquests. The previous summer, the raconteur’s chief adventure had been a distasteful incident with a servant girl which had revolted me in its retelling, and which (I inferred) had, for once, got Kenelm himself into deserved trouble. Tonight’s dinner unfolded true to form, but with an unexpected twist – this summer, Kenelm had set his sights on a respectable young woman named Esme. Over flaccid sole, steak pie and tinned-peach melba, he talked incessantly of her family connections and their engagement plans between groping the waitress and downing more drink.

Enough of this was more than enough. Restless to rejoin the outdoors, I settled up, exchanged temporary farewells, and exited back onto the Custom House Quay. It was well past nine o’clock, but the evening was still light and sultry-warm. A constellation of ships’ lights and harbour lights were mirrored in the water and flickered against the red sky; new knots of humanity came together as others parted. I inhaled deeply, and knew I needed a walk before returning to Ringstead. But where?

One part of the town, away from the bowling greens and award-winning floral clock, had unmanicured nature – and so I struck out along the quay in the opposite direction, away from the Esplanade and towards the tunnel and steps of the Town Bridge, where one could cross the water to the south. At the foot of the bridge steps, I paused at a much-needed drinking fountain. As I bent and drank, a wolf-whistle emanated from the tunnel, followed by a lewd proposition from the sailor who had whistled. I caught his eye and shook my head ‘no’, trying to look stern. I was out for fresh air and trees, not trade.

 


	2. Chapter 2: The Throb of Unmanicured Nature

Away from the bridge and the quays, the southern promontory was military and wooded. Beyond it lay the thin sea-flanked causeway to the thinner line of Chesil spit and – suspended from causeway and spit like a gland – the naval Isle of Portland. My own walk, however, remained within Weymouth, and I continued only as far as the barrack road, where paths ran through a wooded peninsula to coastal fortifications at the peninsula’s tip. The sun was setting now, but light from the pink-orange sky still filtered through the tree cover, and the trees themselves – sweet chestnut and tall hazel – were beautiful and bursting with new life: in this season, the chestnuts were laden with catkins, and the hazels’ tight buds exploded with red flowers. The town seemed distant, and already I felt refreshed. My oppression had lifted, and the woods were almost silent but for the sounds of nature: unseen waves lapping close by and crashing against the fort; distant gulls; and only a mild wind caressing the trees. I folded away my cravat into a pocket, unbuttoned my blazer, and inhaled the sweet scents of the woods.

But, as I continued, I realized that the quiet around me was gaining a peculiar density. Even the air seemed to be thickening with I knew not what. I stopped and held my breath. Not all the quiet sounds were wind; could some of them be human? But not speech: breath, and other small noises that I strained to hear or make sense of. Slowly, cautiously, treading with care, by instinct I tried to follow the sounds to their source – scarcely considering whether this was a wise idea at night and alone.

The sounds led me away from the main path, and as I deviated, the open glades became denser, punctuated by areas of thicket and soft hollows, with a hint of a small clearing beyond. I had stumbled into an area that must have been quite screened by nature from the coastal path or the barrack road. As the sounds became legible – or rather, as I came closer to them – I realised, with a nervous lurch deep in my belly, that I had stumbled into something else – something that compelled me to stay hidden, or try to. One bush, hollowed out, seemed to offer a safe vantage point. I dived inside it, strove to calm my hammering heart, and briefly closed my eyes to adjust to the low light.

My hide gave me only a fragmented view of the activity outside, but there was no mistaking, now, what I could hear: rhythmic movement, regular gasping breaths, and occasional – sudden, uncontrolled – low moans. Peering through the foliage, I could see, a few yards ahead, two boys of around my own age – one looked to be in his early 20s, the other younger – who were unambiguously fused in the throes of physical passion. From the items of clothing discarded or half-worn – the older boy, dark-haired, was boldly shirtless, two caps lay on the ground – I discerned immediately that both were naval ratings from the Portland base. The younger boy, sandy-haired, stood braced against a tall tree, his face and raised arms resting against the bark, his taut pale buttocks and thighs exposed, while his friend plunged into him in long, slow – it seemed almost languid – strokes.

From the gliding rhythm and flashes of glistening flesh, I deduced that the lad doing the penetrating had a formidably long prick, but that he was a gentle lover and had taken great care to prepare his friend. With one hand he, too, steadied himself against the tree. The other hand roamed deliciously, squeezing a buttock to pull his friend more fully open, then venturing round the front and up inside his friend’s unbuttoned shirt – from the boy’s sudden moans, the hand must have been exciting his nipples. The two of them moved together united, as choreographed as dancers, back and forth, back and forth – and I glimpsed now that the lad taking the buggering was fully as aroused as his friend. As the dark boy continued his caresses inside his friend’s shirt, I could see that the lad’s cock stood fiercely to attention, and it remained so even when his friend’s increasing – understandable! – pounding urgency squeezed it against the bark of the tree. Indeed, the boy was so desperate with pleasure now that even this accidental roughness seemed to add to his excitement.

In response to the lad’s pleading moans, his dark-haired friend’s lips brushed his ear, whispering love and reassurance – and the hand dropped lower to do its blissful, necessary work of pumping the lad’s darkened, distended cock. At this point, the pair quite lost their co-ordination as the dark older boy reached his shuddering crisis, shooting his first load into his friend; then further spasms, it seemed, as he brought his friend to sweet release in his turn – a messy ecstasy which left the lad swooning sweetly against the tree, his semen running like milky sap down the ridged trunk.


	3. The Bright-Eyed Boy

I need not add, sweet reader, that this twilit vision left me dazed, breathless, and lost in my own sensual reverie. I cannot claim I was wholly ignorant of the act unfolding so graphically in front of me, but never before in my life had I been in the position of watching – inescapably – like this at such close quarters. Nor had my limited youthful experiences as a cadet – where sodomy was for the most part administered as discipline, too often preceded by the lash, and held us boys in fear – hinted that there could be such a thing as tender physical love between men. As the two friends cleaned each other up and – to my regret – shrugged their lovely bodies back into discarded clothes, my rapt fascination continued. Cigarettes were lit and shared; the dark boy wrapped his arms around his friend and pressed their foreheads together. Did I see eyelids flutter and lips kiss? Ordinary boys, affectionate – but far from ordinary for me, because I had never known that _it_ – my own nature and desires, the thing I felt ashamed of – could be like this.

While the lovers by the tree were sated, my own body was now fiercely inflamed – no, more than that, my whole being was alive with arousal. I had become so absorbed in their lovemaking that I felt part of it. My much-loved shirt was untucked and part-unbuttoned – mortified, I realized that, barely knowing it, I had been touching myself inside the fabric as the lovers touched each other. My nipples, twisted and teased, stood out indecently hard; my cock, which had swollen unassisted, throbbed furiously inside my still-buttoned trousers. I tried to reassure myself: I was well-concealed, and surely no one was close enough to hear my excited breath, sense my heat, or indeed notice if I…

But, in my heightened state, I became aware that the two boys I had been watching were not quite alone in this place any more than I was. Between my own gulps for breath, I now realised I could hear other harsh breathing, closer to my hiding place, and echoing from at least one – two? – directions. Through the thicket of leaves, in the fading light, my eyes strained to re-survey my surroundings. Somewhere to my left, I caught the glow of a striking match and two cigarette tips. The boys I could see clearly seemed to be doing no more than sitting in a close embrace and smoking; but urgent sounds from another, barely seen, source confirmed that another pair – evidently as aroused as I was, and no doubt from the same cause – were tossing off together, urging each other on with fevered, filthy whispers that heightened my excitement until I could now barely contain my own moans of lust. Submitting, clumsy and dizzy with need, I struggled with my fly-buttons, then the cussed vent of my underclothes, until my cock sprung free – huge and fully stiff – into my waiting grip. Dry-throated, I tried to summon enough saliva to lubricate my hand, palming the already moist head a little before spitting again to work my full length. Eyes glazed, I stared blankly out through the screen of leaves and lost myself in mounting, implacable, pleasure.

But then, the strangest thing. To my right, a few feet distant from my hiding place, but close enough to see, I stared straight into sparkling eyes, hazel like the trees. Their owner did not seem to notice me or return my gaze, for he was otherwise occupied. Yet more young men! Yet more friends meeting to make love in the woods! But this boy was different. His headful of unruly dark curls signalled that he could not be from Portland or the navy – and, in the half-light, his young face glowed with a sweetness and singular beauty that hit me like a breaking wave. He had the loveliest mouth – but, at that moment, it was wide open and bestowing wet pleasures on a ginger-haired naval lad that, had I any breath to spare by then, would have made me gasp aloud. The rating’s fingers were buried deep, caressing, in the thick dark hair – but I immediately willed him gone as I gazed, enraptured, into the bright eyes of the beautiful boy.

Sweet reader, I have no memory of how I reached my own orgasm; only that it surged and rose like the tide until I flared and burst, pumping spasm after spasm of my own pleasure onto the leaves and twigs and earth, almost faint with it, biting on my free hand in the vain hope of muffling my gasps.

*******

As my pulse calmed and my composure returned, I realised I would need to depart with care. But what of the boy and his friend? Their crisis (or more likely just the rating’s) must have coincided with mine, for the fevered atmosphere outside had cooled, and the two were already on their way. I gazed after them as they receded through the woods, arm in arm, towards the Portland side of the peninsula, determined to imprint the boy on my memory. My besotted eyes saw an open, affectionate demeanour, a coltish, shambolic way of walking, and simple but clean country clothes, which flattered my lovely Antinous better than the most expensive Saville Row tailoring ever could. In a clearing, the two of them stopped, hugged each other hard – and, more surprising to me, shook hands – then went their separate ways. After cleaning myself with a handkerchief, and restoring a semblance of decency to my own dress, I went cautiously on my way too – taking the opposite of their route, to the old stone pier by the fort, before I doubled back along the harbourside into town. On the breakwater at the peninsula’s tip, I stood awhile joyously, arms outstretched along the weathered iron railings, and let the salt elements buff me clean.


	4. Jack on the Quay

Back across the bridge, the same sailor was still offering his sexual wares, and for the second time that night I refused him – but with what different emotions, even sympathy! My first, curt, refusal had been mere respectable reflex, born of guilt, self-denial and self-fear. I told myself that my second ‘no’ was because I was already erotically satisfied, but that was only part of the truth. The queer delirium that had thrilled and possessed me among the trees had stirred me to my deepest core, and was already rearranging my being. My body, lit tonight as never before, could have taken more – rough coupling and real human contact – but my stolen heart was full and had no need. Besides, I was tired.

> ‘Need anything, sir?’

I had ignored earlier that the importunate tar was young and black-haired, with a physique that would have excited Michelangelo, the Ancient Greeks or even the _à la mode_ Cubists, but in truth was not quite my type. Broad shoulders, pumped biceps and a powerful chest narrowing to a slim waist produced the effect of an exaggerated triangle that drew the gaze helplessly downwards towards the main goods; and I observed now that even the man’s chosen position and pose were calculated to flaunt exactly what was on offer. The lamplight revealed, in silhouette, a white uniform that clung graphically tight to every contour and bulge as the brazen tart lounged against the tunnel wall, one thigh raised to flex his foot back against the brick, so that his hips tilted provocatively forward.

> ‘No … thank you,’ I added.

As well as his other considerable assets, the man had eyes, and I could feel these appraising my own, far more slender, body.

> ‘Yer sure of that, sir? Excuse the question, but —’ Here, the burly minx had the gall to lower his lashes at me, while running a hand down his own hip — ‘yer seem _heated_.’

I had no idea how to reply suitably to this, so instead I downcast my own gaze – the picture of innocent bashfulness, but (to my self-astonishment) feeling secretly proud.

> ‘Been somewhere nice?’

I must have blushed at that, in the dark, but I could not suppress a small smile. And then I did meet his eyes – it seemed churlish not to – and nodded silently. My glowing face – and more elusive clues – must have told him their own story.

His eyes were a very dark blue like the night harbour, and there was humour and understanding in them that caught me off-guard. (I am ashamed to write that last sentence. I mean, really, that I had not expected to find these qualities in a quayside tart.) He grinned – too knowingly, but how could I blame him? – with a broad smile, not unfriendly, punctuated by a mismatched pair of gold molars.

> ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m not staying in Weymouth, and I have to ride back. I’ve had a long night here. Already, I mean.’
> 
> ‘I _bet_ yer have, eh!’

I must have betrayed some annoyance at this impertinence, for he suddenly turned apologetic.

> ‘Forgive me, sir. Please. Hand on heart, I don’t mean yer no offence. It’s just…’

His words died, stuttering off into mortified silence. His pumped-up bravado and brazenness had all gone, replaced by a painfully genuine awkward shyness. When he spoke again, his words rushed out fast, embarassed.

> ‘It’s just … yer really something. Did yer know that? Couldn’t stop looking at you earlier – couldn’t stop thinking, either. Yer – you’re – you’re one beautiful cove, sir.’

His ears and neck had flushed red. He could barely look at me – and now I could barely look at him.

> ‘I – I – I don’t know what to say,’ I stammered uselessly.

Shyness – like desire – is the great leveller. Whoever would have guessed, from our mutual disarray, that one of us was the Oxonian illegitimate son of a baronet, the other a merchant-navy whore?

> ‘Thank you,’ I managed to add. ‘You’re very kind.’ Because I had not known that – not with the certitude his blurting admiration assumed.
> 
> ‘I truly mean it, sir. Yer welcome to have it with me any time, any way yer want. I’d be over the moon, sir, if yer catch my drift. But…’ — He held out a tattooed hand towards mine — ‘There _is_ someone, int there, sir? Someone special to ye already? I could tell from the look of yer when yer come back just now.’

And now I was too stunned to speak at all – so instead I took his hand.

> ‘What’s your name?’ I asked.
> 
> ‘I’m Jack. Jack Tar!’ He laughed at his own silly joke. ‘No, but I really _am_ Jack. Jack by name and Jack by trade, eh!’
> 
> ‘I’m Tom,’ I said, and shook his hand properly.
> 
> ‘Tom!’
> 
> ‘And you were right,’ I said. ‘About tonight. And about the someone special. But I don’t even know his name.’
> 
> ‘Ooooh!’ He raised his eyebrows theatrically, his dockside innuendo fully restored. But then he took my hand again, serious and sincere. ‘He will find you, and you him – I’m sure of it. And don’t yer worry, Tom. Yer know the saying hereabouts? What happens in Weymouth stays in Weymouth. Shake on it?’

We shook hands on it. Amid cries of ‘Find me here any weekend!’ and ‘I drink at The Closet, back up St Edmund’s!’, I departed, smiling at our unlikely new friendship, to find my bike. And I rode back to Ringstead through the beautiful night as if floating on air, already dreaming of the hazel-eyed boy with the chestnut curls.

**Author's Note:**

> This story and its characters are fiction, but strongly inspired by a real place (or places), period, and some coincidences of geography that my fic-writing brain has been fascinated by (and wanted to do something with) for some time. I don’t want to say too much...!
> 
> I loved the challenge of researching and writing this story. The characters live on in my dreams (if only in mine) and won’t leave me alone – and so I have continued to write, regardless of whether there are readers for that. :)
> 
> However, the slash exchange this fic was written for was made extremely discouraging for me by nasty Anon harpies on the challenge comm site and on Fail Fandom Anon. (I had no idea when I signed up to write that this exchange was connected with FFA.) To these harpies, I apologise profusely for dreaming, researching, writing and sharing this story. Thank you for making me understand that the purpose of the challenge was to discourage writers from participating, and to give yourselves a platform from which to snipe and bitch at the efforts of others – anonymously, so that you and your own fic (if, indeed, you write) are protected from the same scrutiny.


End file.
